Favorite Even the reports that are supposed to provide transparency about the FBI’s use of national security lettters (NSLs) are secret—or at least a couple dozen pages of them are. NSLs are nonjudicial orders that allow the FBI to obtain information from companies, without a warrant, about their customers’ use of services. They almost always…
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Cops Need to Obey Facebook’s Rules
Favorite Facebook scolded the Drug Enforcement Administration this week after learning that a narcotics agent had impersonated a user named Sondra Arquiett on the social network in order to communicate and gather intelligence on suspects. In a strongly worded letter to DEA head Michele Leonhart, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan reiterated that not only…
Automated Mass Surveillance is Unconstitutional, EFF Explains in Jewel v. NSA
Favorite Today EFF filed our latest brief in Jewel v. NSA, our longstanding case on behalf of AT&T customers aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ communications. The brief specifically argues that the Fourth Amendment is violated when the government taps into the Internet backbone at places like the AT&T…
The Troubling Arguments from the Government in Smith v. Obama
Favorite We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend. Another…
EFF, Internet Archive, and reddit Oppose New York’s BitLicense Proposal
Favorite Privacy, Economic and Free Speech Flaws in Proposed Bitcoin Regulatory Scheme San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with reddit and the Internet Archive, today filed formal comments with the New York State Department of Financial Services opposing the state’s proposed regulations for digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In the letter, EFF…
Open Letter from Diego Gomez: “Access to Knowledge Is a Global Right”
Favorite The progress of knowledge is fueled by people who dedicate their lives to a field—to read, examine, and absorb everything they can out of passionate intellectual curiosity. Diego Gomez is one of these individuals, and is dedicated to the conservation of reptiles and amphibians. Unfortunately, like so many scholars around the world, Diego’s work…
Students Re-Launch Open Access Button App to Find Free Access to Scientific and Scholarly Research
Favorite Millions of people use research everyday. From students, medical professionals, to curious hobbyists, we all benefit from being able to access, read, and cite reliable, tested information. But getting the research we need can be hard and costly when it’s locked up behind expensive paywalls. Two university students, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, were…
International Copyright Policy Laundering and the Ongoing War on Access to Knowledge
Favorite How is it possible that someone could face years in prison for sharing an academic paper online? How did we arrive at such extreme criminal punishments for accessing knowledge and information? Well, this has been long in the making. We got here because Big Content interests have dominated secretive, back-room copyright negotiations over several…
Where Copyright Fails, Open Licenses Help Creators Build Towards a Future of Free Culture
Favorite One of the convictions that drew law professor and former EFF board member, Lawrence Lessig, to co-found Creative Commons was that a narrow and rigid application of copyright law made no sense in the digital age. Copying digital information over long distances and at virtually no cost is what the Internet does best; indeed,…
Research Is Just the Beginning: A Free People Must Have Open Access to the Law
Favorite The open access movement has historically focused on access to scholarly research, and understandably so. The knowledge commons should be shared with and used by the public, especially when the public helped create it. But that commons includes more than academic research. Our cultural commons is broader than what is produced by academia. Rather…